Office Necessities 101
So I've been thinking quite a bit about what facilities should be provided within a company to it's employees. So for a startup company I kinda figure that it should be minimalistic to the extreme. As I kinda figure that for an IT company, I would initially be bootstrapping the operation I have for the past year been thinking about different areas vital for the success and happiness of the company and employees. Making your employees happy does not have to break the bank, it just has to show you care about their wellbeing. Remember, it's the small things that count. I've narrowed it down to the following items for a small startup:
Fast Internet Access
In this day and age, Internet access is a necessity. Browsing the web may be regarded as a hinderance in some industries however in mine it is often regarded as sources of inspiration, discovering new techniques and methods for problem solving. I really do figure that a sure sign that a company is dying is when they start sending their employees on extremely expensive training courses to learn for example a new programming language or tool. It seems very strange to me to waste large amounts of money on those courses especially when all the required material that is taught on these courses are available directly from the web. I should emphasise that the access should be as fast as possible. Many interesting resources are now coming over in screencast form which requires decent bandwidth to watch, besides, if an employee is waiting an age to do something like this, you are losing money due to lack of productivity.
Having lived in China for some time I was often quite annoyed by some of the speeds outside of the mainland, this was due to mainly government filtering however I can imagine many others were in a worse situation than me. Having worked in this Chinese company for some time I can only imagine the difficulties their IT department encountered daily to get direct stable connections to the United States for rapid development, testing and deployment of large solutions.
A Clean Comfortable Adjustable Environment
I don't know how many times I have heard about people complaining about bad backs, sore eyes and migraines. I myself notouriously suffer from extreme cases of migraines however I am often spending 16+ hours a day in front of a monitor. Solutions such as enforcing breaks between coding sessions, comfortable erogonomic chairs, correctly positioned monitors and desks, really do make life a lot easier for your employees. As I said, it's all about the small things. Having coffee at hand 24x7 is vital. Startups do not keep regular working hours, it is often a case of working hard all day, working hard all night. It is not something I recommend to everyone but some people need more in their life. They need to be part of an idea and seeing it through. So back to the office, having clean facilities makes a huge difference. Working in a logistics company for a time I noticed that for an office of 5 people they had a maid come in every morning, just to empty garbage, clean floors, freshen up desks and take away stale cups of coffee. It's really worth noticing the smiles on the staffs faces when they were smelling fresh scents around their work environment, it really does make a huge difference.
My personal favourite was when I was working in Dalian, every evening without fail during the winter I was privy to some of the most epic sunsets of my lifetime. Having a great view from where you do your daily slog is extremely beneficial, especially when you just need to take 5 minutes out of your day with your jaw open, gaping at it's beauty. The chances of this happening in a small startup are remote as hell with the likelyhood of working from your parents basement much more plausabile.
An Efficient Storage Solution
Investing in hardware at the start while working on a prototype is probably a venture doomed to deadpool hell, spending over 5 grand on a server is a bit much initially with zero capital coming in so I would think about perhaps using a third party solution like say slicehost to manage a virtualised solution. Extra machines can be daisy-chained together to provide quite an efficient clustered environment. Alternatively leverage various clouds that are in existance through their API's, such as Amazon and the upcoming Google Apps service. I have had first hand experience working with companies who have not thought far enough ahead to anticipate these types of issues, they are a nightmare to workaround as once employees get comfortable with one insufficient solution, it is a difficult challenge to break their mindset and habits.
The reason I really do mention storage solutions is that it is incredibly annoying when that piece of code you wrote 2 weeks ago was not correctly backed up, or the drive that it was on crashed out. I have seen companies rely on one storage system, there was never a backup of that backup. I myself have lost over 1 TB of data this past month with not just 1 drive failing, but both, simultanously. I think there was a gremlin and coffee involved.
So I'm coming to an end with this blog post, in future episodes I'll be talking about the main requirement of a startup - incredibly smart people. Also, coming up with an idea will be something I'll be also dwelling on too. If you have any other suggestions I'd love to hear from you, as always, comments are extremely welcome.
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